Andrea Riseborough interview: 'People think I'm crackers'

Andrea Riseborough is the star - and saviour - of Madonna's new film, W.E. She
is spellbinding onscreen and idiosyncratic, fiercely principled and
alarmingly intense off. The award-winning actress talks to Stella magazine.

Andrea RiseboroughPhoto: STEFAN RUIZ

By Hermione Hoby

7:30AM GMT 06 Nov 2011

I’d expected Andrea Riseborough to struggle when I asked her which of her performances she was most proud of.

Would it be her steely yet sympathetic Thatcher in the BBC drama The Long Walk To Finchley (2008)?

Or Brighton Rock, in cinemas last year, of which one critic wrote, 'her portrayal as Rose grips the heart from the beginning and does not let go until the final frame’?

Or perhaps W.E., the forthcoming Madonna-directed film about Wallis Simpson in which, by all accounts, Riseborough’s central performance is the saving grace?

And what of her latest: a mesmerising turn in Resistance, set in an imaginary occupied Welsh village during the Second World War?

No, it was none of these. She answers straight away and with a smile that it was actually reading a bit from Twelfth Night in class when she was 14.

'I remember it so vividly, being really flushed afterwards. I felt that my classmates felt I was simultaneously ridiculous – a geek for being so passionate about it – and also, and it might have been my imagination, but I felt they were impressed.

'That they sort of didn’t know where that came from, that there was something in it, that we’d been able to transport ourselves somewhere during that speech.’

And then she laughs: 'I could do it again now but it probably wouldn’t be as good’.

We’re in a downtown Manhattan hotel too chic even to have its name on the door, but I feel like one of the floored members of that classroom.

It is immediately clear that Riseborough, who is 30, functions at an extraordinary level of intensity. It is impressive but also a little disconcerting.

A frothy question, for example, enquiring how she enjoyed the photo-shoot, elicits a furrowed brow and, finally, this answer: 'I think we created something really beautiful in terms of colour and palette.

'There were some unique textures and colours. I enjoy the collaborative process of making any kind of art and I suppose, because it’s a photography session, by its nature it is a piece of art of sorts.’

Then there is her beauty, which has an alarming quality. Her strong forehead, luminous pallor and round, doll-blue eyes are captivating yet so nakedly ardent one almost feels the need to turn away.

In Resistance the camera often just lingers on her unmoving features, locked on her eyes, which silently swim with pain.

Based on the novel by Owen Sheers, the film follows a group of women who wake to find their husbands disappeared from their village and the valley occupied by German soldiers.

Riseborough plays Sarah, a young wife who refuses to collude, in a performance of heartbreaking stillness. She was drawn, she says, to the film’s 'quiet, painful ebb of loneliness – just being utterly lost without your life’.

When she watched Resistance, she says, 'I felt like [my character] looked ill. And that was something I was really happy we managed to achieve.’

Suddenly aware that this may sound immodest, she adds, with just a touch of defiance: 'I think it’s the easiest thing in the world to be horribly critical about yourself.

'But I think we’re moving toward a greater ease as a human race with ourselves. We’re all more exposed on a day-to-day basis, posting things on the internet and YouTube: we’re all… we’re happier to expose.’

Not that she goes in for social media herself. Her only dalliance has been brief and in the name of love.

She met the artist Joe Appel three years ago at the première of a Woody Allen film in Los Angeles, after which they 'talked for 36 hours’. Then she lost her phone and, with it, his number.

'I woke up in the morning and realised I had no way of ever contacting him again.

'So I joined Facebook and the only key words at my disposal were “Ohio” – which was completely wrong because he’s not from Ohio, he’s from Idaho – and “Joe” and “snowboarding”.

'I had 22,000 results that came up. Who would have thought? “Ohio”, “snowboarding” and “Joe” – 22,000. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.’

Eventually her phone resurfaced – and the pair have now been together for two and a half years living what sounds like an idyllic, bohemian existence in the Los Feliz neighbourhood of Los Angeles.

Right now they’re working on a joint exhibition of their photography. It makes utter sense that she takes pictures: I tell her she seems a very watchful person.

'Oh, absolutely!’ she says in her clipped Northern accent. 'We’d go for happy-hour pizza when I was little and I used to sit with eyes agog and mouth wide open watching someone, and I’d have to be told to stop catching flies.

'I was like a sponge, just constantly watching and quietly copying. I did a lot of talking to myself, being other people.

'I think there are people who are very extreme that way and can perceive things, and then there are people who are very in tune with the solidity of the earth. But,’ she adds unnecessarily, 'I’m less in tune with that.’

She insists on getting the bus in Los Angeles so she can people-watch.

'People think I’m totally crackers,’ she says with a laugh. 'But because of what I do it’s absolutely – not just necessary – but vital that I absorb people in order to reflect them.’

Riseborough was born in Whitley Bay, the eldest daughter of 'working-class Thatcherites’: her father was a used-car salesman and her mother a secretary.

There were, she says, two things that shaped her world as a child. One was Shakespeare and the other was black and white film.

'I used to look into the TV to see if I could see what was happening round the corner, the bits that the camera wasn’t capturing – you know, the people in the background.’

She was a star pupil and her teachers thought she was destined for Oxford, but halfway through her A-levels she dropped out. She doesn’t seem to know why.

In an earlier interview, she had said that she simply 'became disenchanted with the whole A-level process’ and 'just knew I had to live in a flat that cost £45 a week’.

She moved to Newcastle and paid the rent with a series of short-lived jobs. At what moment did she decide that acting was what she wanted to do?

There is a long pause. She sits perfectly still, with her head slightly cocked, eating an apple with tiny, rapid, crunches that could be the sound of her brain whirring.

'I suppose I’ve been doing it my whole life, really, in an amateur sense. But the moment that I decided this was actually going to happen, I was shredding a duck in a Chinese restaurant.’

It was an epiphany? 'Of sorts,’ she says. 'It didn’t feel like a breaking-point. I mean duck fat can be depressing. And also... when a duck dies it kind of smells of pee.

'But there was a moment of feeling propelled. I wouldn’t even say ready. I’m not even sure that any of us are ever ready for anything. We can be ripe, or over-ready, but what is that moment when we’re actually ready?

'But it was the thing that most awoke my soul, and that sounds horribly self-important, I’m sure. But it gave me a sense of completion, the thought of that being my service to the world.’

She applied to Rada, moved to London and has been involved in an impressive string of projects ever since. That’s despite the fact that she is, she says firmly, 'very picky’ with work.

Sometimes, she tells me, she receives scripts in which the character is described as 'hot’. She gives a brief pause for effect and then says tartly:

'I have yet to decide whether that means they’re on fire or whether they’re in a hotter climate.’

At times like these she can seem terribly quaint: an old soul in a young woman’s body. When the waiter arrives with her tea another such moment occurs.

'I keep saying it smells like coffee, don’t I?’ she says as he unloads the tray. He nods with a long-suffering smile.

It transpires that some tea served to her earlier had been made in a pot previously used for coffee. She, displaying a gourmand’s sensitivity, could taste it.

'It’s terrible – even if someone uses their sugar spoon in tea I taste it.’

I make a joke about the princess and the pea, regretting it slightly as soon as it comes out of my mouth.

'I wouldn’t say that – I don’t know that I’d notice a pea under seven mattresses. Can I pour you some Earl Grey?’

We talk about reviews, which, she says, she avoids reading. That’s partly because she feels giving weight to another person’s assessment would 'be disrespectful to the director.

'And say if the review was nice and they picked out one moment, every time [the play or the film] got to that moment I’d be like, “Check me out doing this bit!” It would be ’orrible!

'But, God, it’s the most wonderful thing when people appreciate the project that you have so passionately and tirelessly invested in. It’s great, it makes you feel less mad.

'I can be so impassioned by things that I can feel crazed with it, wanting to be inside of it, to relax within it.’

She pauses before delivering what sounds like a personal maxim: 'You have to be so brave that you get so crazed that ultimately you can be relaxed.’

Before making Resistance Riseborough filmed W.E., playing the American divorcee – later the Duchess of Windsor – for whom King Edward VIII abdicated the throne.

Riseborough wears 72 couture dresses in as many scenes. 'There were pieces that I was wearing that were worn by the Duchess herself, that were evoking her spirit in some sense.’

I’d hoped she’d be coaxed into gossiping about Madonna, but there’s nothing but effusiveness.

'It was just a joy meeting her. And it has been and will continue to be a joy getting to know her more and more. I enjoy her company very much and I find her ultimately inspiring.

'She has such a tireless relationship with her own art. It’s phenomenal, really. Anyway,’ she says warmly, 'I’ll stop talking now. It’s been lovely.’

She gets up, tucking a book of Ginsberg poems under her arm and planting a fedora on her head. She is instantly transformed from English rose to rakish artist.

She’s both of those things, of course – an earnest, exhausting, ultimately endearing soul one can’t help not only forgiving but saluting for her idiosyncratic ways.